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I thought that competitive business was supposed to hire the most qualified and motivated candidates? Seriously, get out there, carve out your own space, and get hired! "Diversity" is just a politically correct buzzword and is not guaranteed to lead to an agile workforce..

The problem is that most of the factors in achieving and maintaining qualification and motivation, after lots of research, appear to be societal and economical. Therefore we are not getting the most qualified and motivated but a small sub-set of that group (white males) and standards could be raised if we could choose from a larger set. "Carve out your own space and get hired" is simply a gross over-simplification of the situation. Lack in basic nutrition, healthcare, education, credit, role-models and many other factors and their interplay might be a factor perhaps?

66% of Computer Science graduates are white, 15% Asian, 3% black, and 5% Hispanic. I'm surprised they have such a high percentage of Asian workers. Of course 60% of students graduating with master's degrees in computer science aren't Americans so maybe that's where they are coming from. Also 80% of Computer Science graduates are male and 20% are female, so it's not surprising that tech companies have primarily male workers.

I never said either group was anything. I said the most qualified and motivated people get jobs in a perfect world. Affirmative action for its own sake, conversely, is discrimination against people who worked their butts off for a position and were passed over because they were the wrong gender or color.

I never said either group was anything. I said the most qualified and motivated people get jobs in a perfect world. Affirmative action for its own sake, conversely, is discrimination against people who worked their butts off for a position and were passed over because they were the wrong gender or color.

That's not true at all. I'm *amazing* in interviews. It's truly probably my best skill. If I get into the interview I almost always get the job. How do I do so well? Is it because of my experience? Grasp of the technology? Does my personality exude an air of efficient and dedicated work habits?

No, you get hired based on psychology, and if you know what's going on you can manipulate that. My biggest concern in an interview is that I accidentally get myself hired for a job I can't do... which has happened before. If I can get hired for a job I'm totally unqualified for, there's something wrong with the system.

Hiring managers are biased, from the very start. Your resume tells them all kinds of stuff about you that you didn't realize. Your race is implicit in your name. Your age as well. Do you go my Charlie? Charles? Chuck? That all says a lot about you. The most important part of the interview is the handshake of all things... that sets the tone. Want to know how to do it properly, ask a Marine, they'll show you. What did you wear? Again, this says a lot about you. The hiring manager doesn't even realize that they're being discriminatory. What they are looking for is someone familiar, and they will pick whomever is the most familiar.

The easiest way to game this system is the simple rule: Let the interviewer talk.Listen to what they talk about, what they are interested in, and then when they ask you a tough question (Almost always something they have written down to remember because it's very hard to keep on topic in interviews) answer in a way that leads you back to a topic they're interested in. If they were talking about football earlier, answer with a football analogy. Lead the answer to a point where you ask them a question "So if a running back were to... etc... would you think that would work?" More often than not the hiring manager will go off on a tangent about football. In the end all they really remember about the interview was how comfortable they were talking with you.

There are lots of other tricks in this regard but they all revolve around the same premise: Make yourself as familiar as possible to the interviewer. The more they have in common with you the more they will be inclined to pick you. They'll later claim it was "instinct" that lead them to you.

As much as I've benefited from this 'flaw' in the system I can't pretend it's because I'm such a desirable employee. It's clearly very easy for this to lead to discriminatory behavior. The only solution to this that I can think of is to treat hiring like a science experiment. Use double blind methodology. There's no reason for anyone to ever meet the candidate either. The hardest jobs for me are the ones where they basically send me a test ahead of time. "Answer these technical questions" even using Google and such, your lack of experience (if you have any) becomes very apparent in the way you phrase your answers. I've also seen places where the interviews/test/etc... are all done by HR, the candidates are scored by HR and then the hiring manager looks at the numbers. This is better but you end up with a lot of employees that would be great in HR but not so hot in IT. HR reps, for some reason, tend to score candidates that dress nicely very high.

If our current job market really did go after the "best" candidate for the job, and that resulted in racial disparity, I'd agree with you. But it doesn't. Our current system leads to hiring people that are most like the current employees at the company which is bad for the company, the people interviewing and the current employees. Monocultures are bad for everyone.

That's a nice theory, but you haven't addressed the elephant in the room: virtually all resumes for tech jobs are from white men. I don't even know how they came up with this 35% number. I've never worked at a tech company where 1/3rd of the technical workers were women (usually, HR is very female and that's about it). I think my Comp Sci classes were around 90-95% male.

Expectation bias coming in... There is a stereotype that Asians are better at science and math - and thus it is expected you'll "do fine" in those areas. As a caucasian who lived in Shanghai for 6 years, I saw that all the time with my fellow American/white coworkers, in how they would interview/recommend people. And I used the stereotype of "really smart at business because he is a white guy in China" more than once as well. Stereotypes are as useful as interpersonal skills when it comes to interviews.

Almost always? Nothing funnier than an Internet braggart who must equivocate.

First: I brag in real life as well. No need to tack "Internet" onto that statement.Second: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c... [yourlogicalfallacyis.com] My failings do nothing to invalidate my point.Third: You can only claim I'm equivocating if you only look at that sentence you quoted. Taken as a whole, I give examples of how I might not "get the job" and those are: Different hiring techniques, I fail to make myself familiar to the hiring staff, etc...:-)

In the 1980's, Millitary service was not a score booster. Scored top in #1. Scored 4th after step 2. Did not apply for any other government position due to chilling effects.

Private industry scores on just #1 unless forced by government pressure for tax breaks or other reasons. Lately there has been lots of pressure by the US Government to "Make it Right"

Due to my Race, Religiion, Gender, Sexual Orientation, & Age, I have a poor chance. Only recently Vetran status is the bright spot on my Resume. With the recent issues with BPA HR, I would have a chance at getting hired if in addition to Vetran status, I was a protected minority, femaie, gay, muslum, etc. In the meantime, I'm in the majority with slimming chances at economic recovery.

Perhaps women are being guided away from technical pursuits at an early age by the gender stereotypes of their parents and teachers. Perhaps they have freely chosen to do other things. Neither is Yahoo/Google's problem. There are plenty of scenarios where they're simply hiring qualified people who apply for positions, and less than half of those happen to be women.

Perhaps women are being guided away from technical pursuits at an early age by the gender stereotypes of their parents and teachers. Perhaps they have freely chosen to do other things. Neither is Yahoo/Google's problem.

Wrong. It is most definitely Yahoo/Google's problem, and a huge one. Their potential customer base contains mostly people (women + male minorities) who the companies have very little understanding of in their creative development staff. There is no way this doesn't retard the service they give their users, which in the long run affects their own bottom-line.

I grew up in the 80s under that same concept as well: "equality means everyone is treated equally"

But again, we're in a different world today. The fresh crop feels that a special status called 'privilege' exists, and that anyone who even tangentially benefits from that status is less of a person because of it.

And in fact, they probably don't realize what a piece of shit they actually are, until they shed their 'privilege' and join the war against the machine.

Or something.

These are the kinds of people who wonder why too few Google employees have thrown themselves off cliffs in order to bring the gender gap down.

Not data, but. I recently was involved in hiring in a STEM field. Saw dozens of resumes a small number of them were from women. I don't know how many may have been from minorities because we don't ask. Of all of the candidates only three were considered qualified enough to interview. One was woman. She got the job.However if you start at the beginning of the process the pool of people we had to chose from contained few women. Just so happened that this time a woman was the best candidate. Other times that might not have been the case, but in every hiring action I've been involved with the number of women who apply is always vastly smaller than the number of men.According to Economix the number of women graduates in computer science last year was 20%. Computerworld claims it's even less at 18%. With a workforce of 35% women they are actually significantly above the average of new graduates.So if there is a problem it's not Google's or Yahoo's. It goes back to why are so few women going into computer science? Perhaps for the same reason that so few men are going into nursing or veterinarian medicine? It just doesn't interest them as a profession.

Plus 1 insightful, but no mod points. I recall almost 20 years ago the single black person working in our department stood up at a department meeting and asked when more blacks would be hired, and the VP of the company stood up to field the question and answered, quite simply, "when more qualified black people apply for open positions." And then he sat down. And that was that. We did hire more black people... the guy that asked the question made it his goal to seek out talented black people for open positions, and succeeded on several occasions; but he realized there was no racism going on, there was just good business going on.

Good point. I guess he realized there wasn't and racism by the company. But you're right... people who insist on equality, and therefore seek to make it so by focusing only on candidates of a particular race (or sex) are themselves being racist (or sexist).

Finding qualified women is less difficult than finding qualified blacks as long as you aren't looking for qualified _white_ women. If I scrap management and QA from my company, we have exactly one white woman in tech. We have as many Hispanic women. To put that in perspective, we have more (at least semi) out of the closet gay and lesbians than either of those (with at least 3 lesbians in management). The only black guy I work (directly) with is native Ethiopian who attended college in the US and then got a green card and eventually citizenship.

When I interviewed prospective employees last, I interviewed 40 (mostly) white men, 0 women, 1 person of color (Indian from India), and one man from Ecuador that spoke English poorly. How are you supposed to diversify when you don't even have diverse candidates? We ended up hiring a white guy and the person from India, even though I recommended against him (most of the white guys were better qualified). Incidentally, HR wanted us to hire a woman for diversity reasons, but that is kind of difficult given that we didn't have any female candidates. We have hired women for my site, but mostly in India and China and then relocated them.

My wife changed careers 10 years ago from teacher to network engineer. She tries VERY HARD to get other women insterested in going into tech fields. She has oodles of money from her job, while all her female friends make less than half what she makes. But none of her friends or relations are even remotely interested in changing their career, even though they all complain about not making enough money.

Hell, I try to get more women interested in the tech fields all the time to no avail. I've even gone to career days at local high-schools to try to get women interested in tech careers. Last time I interviewed a woman for a programmer-trainee job she decided she wanted to do something else after we offered her the job, she didn't even try it.

So the problem seems to be pretty cultural. Even with someone offering to mentor them, most women (based on my limited sample) have little or no interest in the tech fields. And these are all smart, educated women. I imagine we really need to change the way we bring up girls if we want to fix the situation.

So it will remain a sausage fest wherever I work until I retire, I guess.

Along these lines I've suggested my wife change to IT many, many times. She's smarter than I am and would be better at it, I'd think. Then we could both be making double her salary, instead of just me.

How are you supposed to diversify when you don't even have diverse candidates?

I'm just throwing out ideas here, but perhaps society's finally ready to re-introduce the same measure that social activists of prior generations once employed to boost the diversity of theater troupes, and add a few gallons of black face paint to the discretionary budget.

unscientific anecdotal evidence here: in my 15 years as an engineer with the ability to interview candidates that HR presents me, I have interviewed 3 women and 1 black man. I ended up recommending hire for 100% of the women and 100% of the black candidates. But they are like.01% of all the interviews i've done.

I have no idea why i never see women or black people, but as an engineer, i'm not really picking who's a candidate for an interview. In all cases, HR presents me with candidates and leads me to be

So why is there such a disparity between Google & Yahoo's female proportions? Seriously, none of this shit passes the smell test. Women don't want to do this. Black people don't like doing that. It's utter bullshit from top to bottom. It's not nice to admit there is a massive fucking problem here but the first step really is admitting it.

And you add to the stink. We hear much about the disparity in numbers based on gender. Okay.But as to the stinky stuff, why do we not get very much in the way of applications based on gender.

You start with the presumption that he suggested men are being chosen over women and that women are competing.He was actually suggesting that there are not women to compete with in many positions, and that without offering a handicap to positions they are competing in, diversity is a pipe dream.

I.e. if 70% of engineering jobs have 10% female applicants and the rest have 50%, all other things being equal, the mix may be 78% male, 22% female, from a completely non discriminatory hiring practice.

You are correct in aggregate - of course companies cannot hire people who don't exist - but I really struggle to believe that *Google* has 17% female application rates after controlling for education.

Why do you struggle to believe this?

The 17% figure reported is for tech workers only - their overall and non-tech numbers are much better, with 30% and 48% women respectively. You can see their released numbers here. [google.com]

From this publication by the ASEE: [asee.org]
"...females accounted for 18.4 percent of [engineering] bachelor’s degrees, up slightly from 18.1 percent in 2010. The percentage of master’s degrees awarded to women remained unchanged at 22.6 percent; while that of doctoral degrees decrea

If you say the most qualified get jobs, and the jobs are going to men, then the women most be less qualified. No? All I am asking is for you to back that statement up: either show women are underqualified/less motivated. The alternative is that job allocation is actually not 100% meritocratic.

Are you as concerned about the fact that there are far more female than male nurses? Do you think men are less qualified?

Or maybe certain careers appeal more to one gender than the other.....

Not motivated - Women care more about careers like nursing and teaching elementary school, minorities care more about trying to make it big as a baller, rapper, or other field that doesn't require much education.

Not qualified - Very few women and minorities graduate with degrees in computer science or engineering.

You can argue between the causes (genetics, society, discrimination, etc.), but you can't refute these facts are true on the whole.

Not qualified - Very few women and minorities graduate with degrees in computer science or engineering.

Not true. Most Silicon Valley companies, including both Yahoo and Google, have a tech workforce that is mostly non-white. I spoke at a CS seminar at UC Berkeley last month, and I was the only white person in the room. Most minorities are over represented in tech. It is only blacks, and to a lesser extent, Hispanics, that are not.

Can you provide some evidence that the wimmin and minorities are neither motivated nor qualified?

Wait, are you one of the "wimmin" spelling women? For some reason, I can't get into this at all. True, I'm a dude, but it's somewhere more annoying than nails on a chalkboard, and almost as annoying as enormous ear gauges. Like, "yay, we can spell 'women' without 'men' now!" No, not.

I'm not OP, but I'd be happy to. According to this site: http://www.ngcproject.org/stat... [ngcproject.org] only 18% of computer science grads are women in the US. That means Yahoo has women over-represented and Google is about right. You can't blame Yahoo, Google, et al for the market of candidates being mostly men. The problems that cause that exist far before Yahoo or Google might be involved. Talk to primary educators, parents, etc.

The charts released by Yahoo indicate women fare worse in its global tech workforce...

They indicate nothing of the sort. They indicate that Yahoo has fewer female workers than male workers. That is it.

Insinuating that female workers "fare worse" at Yahoo is akin to insinuating that there is rampant sexism and a glass ceiling going on there, which is most likely simply untrue. The truth is that there are simply fewer females applying for positions because there are fewer female CS graduates, which is the ACTUAL fact.

If you want more women in the tech workforce, you need to start at the source and graduate more first.

The same thing can be said of blacks. Like it or not the amount of black CS engineers in Silicon Valley is very, very small. You can't artificially create diversity when none exists in the talent pool.

The IT company I work for is full of young, attractive women. They do a very good job in certain areas, such as handling financial contracts, customer calls, renewals, etc.Strictly from a development perspective, they simply might not be attracted/interested by that work type, although I personally knew a couple excellent female developers who work nearby.

There, a similar statement going on the most common stereotype for men - that only geeks work with computers. The GP's post likely meant that despite these women having the looks 'necessary' to just sit at home while their husband earns all the money they have chosen to go into the IT field. It's a stereotype BREAKER, not a stereotype ENFORCER.

Not when discussing men's job choices they don't. Commenting on appearance is most definitely not symmetric. Not even close. Both men and women talk about women's appearance more in contexts where appearance should be irrelevant (e.g., job choice).

IT demographics are somewhat different from CS demographics. But it's still tone-deaf and rather sexist to bring appearance into it when appearance is irrelevant. Especially given the widespread cultural attitude that for women, appearance matters more than accomplishments.

According to this page: http://www.economicmodeling.co... [economicmodeling.com]At the very best, females make up 30.4% of IT graduates.The workforce is 35% female, so on average females are more likely to be hired for IT positions than men.

According to this page: http://www.economicmodeling.co... [economicmodeling.com]At the very best, females make up 30.4% of IT graduates.The workforce is 35% female, so on average females are more likely to be hired for IT positions than men.

At lower paying positions with less potential growth. That kind of skewed those figures.

The same thing can be said of blacks. Like it or not the amount of black CS engineers in Silicon Valley is very, very small. You can't artificially create diversity when none exists in the talent pool.

That doesn't mean it isn't valuable to a company. In any good engineering company, all the best product ideas come from the engineers. That means the more your engineering workforce looks like your potential userbase, the better they are going to be able to serve their potential customers with their new products.

Probably the majority of the users of the hotter social media tools are female. Now I will freely admit at age 47 with a wife and two girls, I don't understand women at all. Perhaps some men are b

It's a little difficult to believe there is a "glass ceiling" at Yahoo considering Marissa Mayer is in the highest position in the company. I'm pretty sure she's a woman, and there is no single position within the company over the CEO.

The board of directors might disagree.

Anyhow, it appears that Yahoo has a higher ratio of female to male IT workers than what the schools produce, which tells me men have a harder time finding a job there than women do.

We desperately want to hire people who are qualified. About half the the people we interviewed were either South or East Asian. One was African American, and she didn't know what multi-threaded processing was.

Just maybe this has nothing to do with race or sexism and they just hired the best people they could find.

Like a lot of people at Slashdot, I work in the IT industry too. Most of our people are male, and either Caucasian or Indian. Does that mean that the company I work for is part of some evil conspiracy to keep aphroditic purple martians out of the IT work force? Nope. We'd hire my dog if she was good at what needed to be done. Nobody cares what your body looks like as long as you're Nice and Competent. We simply don't get a lot of female, Chinese, Norwegian, Mexican, Brazilian, etc., people applying.

Is that a problem? I don't think so. Maybe certain demographics - gasp - have a majority of their interests in other areas. There's far more female nurses in hospitals than male nurses and although I see it mentioned from time to time, I never see hospitals being excoriated and dragged over the coals because they don't have a 50% male nursing force. Basketball is dominated by people with dark skin and I don't see people complaining that the white guys are under-represented.

This isn't any different. The opportunities are there. The education is available. Maybe certain demographics just aren't as interested in IT.

Does your company actually track applicants through to hiring to actually prove that women don't apply? Or is this something you just tell yourself to make y'all feel better?

So are you implying that HR (which is many times heavily female) is intentionally dropping qualified female applicants based on race?I highly doubt this. We don't have an HR department so I see EVERY resume that applies to a position and 90% of them are male.This article makes it sound like google and yahoo are descriminating against females when in reality they have a higher percentageof female in their workforce than the percentage that are graduating from college with CS degrees which IMHO is pretty dar

IT, at least if you listen to the media and the politicians, is currently one of the most important industries that the US has. While it may come down to preference, we don't want to have a culture that in some way discourages people who haven't historically had opportunity from one of the healthiest sectors of the economy. We have some pretty strong statistics that say something is going on here and that something is going on from middle school to end of career. What this means is we need to find out wh

Most enlightened? Hahaha, Silly Valley employers are among the most discriminatory in the world! You just didn't notice because of the trendy offices and hipster glasses. They've created perfect '50s-style silent oppression in the HR department, as you have demonstrated.

From what I've seen they seem to be some of the few companies willing to actively campaign for gay rights equality and so forth for example and they don't seem to have any qualms hiring people from different ethnicities overseas, and in fact have been campaigning for more.

Is your suggestion that because the numbers aren't 50/50 that they're obviously discriminatory or something?

Here is a shocker maybe not enough women want to work in the Tech field? My wife thinks my job sounds horrible and she has no desire to bang away on a computer and thinks I'm crazy for doing it. Everyone seems to think everyone in the world is just like them and since they want to work in a field where you have very little interpersonal interaction that everyone would flock to that job. The same way I don't see a whole lot of men lining up to be elementary school teachers workers women as a whole don't seem as interested in working in the computer field as men. Can't men and women be different or does society now say all jobs must have break downs of people equal to the same population break down. Why can't we just say 100% of the people in working in tech companies are people and not say Women, Men, Asian, Black, White, Hispanic. Why can't we stop dividing people and treat them based on the individual qualities? If you want to work in tech great! if you don't great!

High tech jobs aren't the best job ever for everyone so lets stop the false outrage that this particular line of work does not have equal population distribution unless we are going to do that for all jobs. Where is the outrage of HR professionals, teachers, carpenters or any other job category.

True, but the null hypothesis is that men and women are equally capable at CS, however you measure that. Likewise with whites and blacks. Unless there's data to indicate otherwise, I'm assuming that knowing somebody's race or sex doesn't tell you anything about how likely they are to be good at CS.

>I'm assuming that knowing somebody's race or sex doesn't tell you anything about how likely they are to be good at CS.

Which is exactly why race and gender should not be considered when hiring, and why this story is garbage. Forcing diversity in the work-place directly implies prejudice on the part of those doing the hiring.

Men, particularly blue collar men, have been disproportionately impacted by the bad economy. Where is the same level of enthusiasm about training blue collar men for an "exciting career as a nurse, nurse practitioner, etc.?" Those are high paying, skilled, wildly disproportionately female-dominated positions. They could easily accommodate an influx of men. There is also a true shortage of qualified people, unlike in computer-related fields. Why no interest? Because if we suddenly gave men the opportunity and incentive (ex aggressive recruiting, preferential college admission, etc. ) to pursue those fields, a lot of women might be pushed out and that'd be "sexist."

Where is the same level of enthusiasm about training blue collar men for an "exciting career as a nurse, nurse practitioner, etc.?" Those are high paying, skilled, wildly disproportionately female-dominated positions. They could easily accommodate an influx of men.

Uh, there ARE significant initiatives to try to get men into nursing. The American Assembly for Men in Nursing [aamn.org] is an organization specifically dedicated to the cause. They even have a YouTube channel [youtube.com] dedicated to stories from male nurses trying to convince men to join up. They have a dedicated initative [collegexpress.com] to increase the number of male nurses by 20% by 2020 (the "20 X 20 Choose Nursing" campaign). And then there are other miscellaneous advertising campaigns, like the "Are you man enough to be a nurse?" posters [oregoncent...ursing.org].

Why no interest? Because if we suddenly gave men the opportunity and incentive (ex aggressive recruiting, preferential college admission, etc. ) to pursue those fields, a lot of women might be pushed out and that'd be "sexist."

Uh, no. The main difficulty in recruiting male nurses has to do with stereotypes of the type of caregiving differences [huffingtonpost.com] between doctors and nurses. (If you want even more info, here's a whole Powerpoint presentation [aamn.org] from the AAMN about the various issues involved in recruiting men.)

LOTS of organizations are actively trying to get more men into the nursing profession. Because of social stereotypes, though, most men aren't interested in trying. This has nothing to do with "sexism" or trying to keep men out of the profession.

Men, particularly blue collar men, have been disproportionately impacted by the bad economy. Where is the same level of enthusiasm about training blue collar men for an "exciting career as a nurse, nurse practitioner, etc.?" Those are high paying, skilled, wildly disproportionately female-dominated positions. They could easily accommodate an influx of men. There is also a true shortage of qualified people, unlike in computer-related fields. Why no interest? Because if we suddenly gave men the opportunity and incentive (ex aggressive recruiting, preferential college admission, etc. ) to pursue those fields, a lot of women might be pushed out and that'd be "sexist."

No, because men in general do not want to be caretakers. Do you want to spend the rest of your life changing bed pans? I thought not. Women take these positions because they were taught to do so, instead of pursuing more lucrative medical technician or heaven forbid MD positions. I have several female friends and relatives who are MDs, and they will tell you about the obstacles put in their way since they weren't white males.

I don't think that it has anything to do with sexism or anything else. There really is little or no employment discrimination going on. It is all based on who is skilled and qualified. I think it is due to the fact that certain demographic sections are just not as interested in IT work and they decide to go into another field. The only reason that we are seeing this pattern is because certain groups are more likely to decide one career path over another. And that is their right. So, why are we trying to fo

My company is pretty diverse, and we've been lucky to hire and retain quality people. However, we're small and relatively agile. Google and Yahoo are massive companies, and I'm afraid they will be too heavy-handed in their hiring, and just bring in "diversity" without verifying that they have the skills to do the job. It would be a disservice to those employees to inadvertently be set up for failure.

This is meaningless without knowing the gender/race ratios of suitable job applications.

Although I have no evidence to prove this, from my own long experience in the software industry I strongly suspect that high tech companies are actually NOT giving people a harder time getting in the door because of their ethnicity or gender. I am far more inclined to believe that the numbers of different groups actually employed more closely reflect the ratios of suitable job applications received in the first place.

Sadly, as a woman who was strong in math throughout school, I know most women don't like math, engineering, or even working in the corporate world. It is all very well and good to pick out a few of Silicon Valley's richest firms and then criticize them for not employing enough females. But the more important question is why don't girls go into math/engineering majors in college? It is a load of crap to say the girls don't have enough encouragement to go into the sciences. Fact is many girls like literature, the arts, and humanities because those majors are fun. Girls also like degrees which lead to education and caring for others (i.e. healthcare), that siphons off even more intelligent females. Fact is rooms full of nerdy computer science guys would love a few more women in their midst so I seriously doubt Google/Yahoo/Facebook are discriminating.

I find the last line in the summary pretty... odd. Both Yahoo and Google in their reports make it pretty clear that there are plenty of opportunities for anyone who is interested in working for them. This isn't about opportunity - it's about outcome. In the interview that Google's Laszlo Bock did with PBS (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/googles-diversity-record-shows-women-minorities-left-behind/) he cites the example of hiring 50% of the Black CS PhD graduates in one year - one person. Both companies, and many more in the industry, are trying to fix the problem at where they see the source is - candidates not going into the programs that feed into the industry.

Is there any business or industry that has some kind of perfect mirroring of the broader ethnic and gender demographics between their own population and society at large -- and whose mirror is the same up and down the pay scale (ie, I wouldn't call some some factory with a big majority of blacks or hispanics on the factory floor and all white men in the office a good example)?

Several posts have said, essentially, "shouldn't you hire the best person for the job, ignoring everything else?"

Thats what both Yahoo and Google are saying about why they want to hire a diverse workforce. Both of them realize that their clients and customers are a very diverse group of people, and they hope that by hiring a diverse group as well, they can better create products to meet a diverse set of needs. You can argue that gender and skin color still aren't great ways to find a diverse set of perspectives, and you'd be right, but its one small tool in the arsenal.

Given that 39% of the US personnel are Asian and only 4.9% of the population, whites are under-represented. Of course this shows how silly the claim that the "diversity is flawed" are - the number of employees reflect the number of qualified applicants

My god this shit needs to stop. Affirmative action is just as ridiculous and hypocritical today as it was the day it was suggested. There is nothing to see here - Yahoo has a female CEO for crying out loud.

Always self-selecting. If we are to achieve diversity, the US state needs to drop the bourgeois freedom thing altogether, and simply assign its subjects into educational tracks and positions in public corporations.

Back when the hot girl only sits behind the nerd when she needs to cheat off my exam, and me, being all too eager to comply because girls just never gave me the time of day.

Seriously, the IT field is getting flooded with the "bullying" types, from both the bros and the hos that claim to hate them. Traditionally, engineering and the bookish, eager to work with one another and do cool shit, we're now infiltrated by assholes and douchebags of both sexes taking advantage of those who are less socially integrated. You can't go a day without reading about some Silicon Valley "magnate" who wouldn't rate a 3 on a 10 point geekscale making some bone-headed, wrong-sided statement, and then the 15 articles about how Silicon Valley is some sort of boys club written by people who couldn't spell Javascript, much less write any.

And we've let them. Geeks, long the whipping boy of the popular, buying into this whole alpha male bullshit. Jesus fucking christ, guys, your Silicon Valley heroes? They're *salesmen*, not geeks. Wolves in sheep's clothing. They talk the talk, because that's what they're good at. Give them an editor and what do they produce?

They're preying upon you (us). They want you to doubt yourself because that's what you do best. Your insecurity is their lock on you, whether that be "come on bro, are you cool enough to hang with the jocks?" or the "come on, geek, I'm pretty, I bat my eyelids and you go fetch." Think for yourselves.

If Yahoo's tech work force is really 35% female, that's astoundingly high, far higher than anywhere I've seen in my 25 years in the industry. More tellingly, it's about double the percentage of female CS grads, which says that Yahoo has managed to draw a far higher share of female software engineers than the average in the industry (Google's percentage of female engineers is in line with the CS graduate numbers).

I really don't think there's any sexism on the part of the companies here. I know Google is trying hard to recruit, hire retain and promote more women and minorities, and not just for the sake of political correctness (I work for Google). Google's numbers, as well as those from other studies around the industry, show that diverse teams are more effective, more creative and more efficient. Diversity has non-trivial value to the business, and the companies would like more.

You said:I really don't think there's any sexism on the part of the companies here.Wrong.You yourself pointed out that Yahoo are running upto double the percentage of females than even graduate, and that Google are actively trying hard to recruit, hire retain and promote more women and minorities.

Sorry but being biassed pro-female and pro-minority is not only sexist/racist, but is actually illegal according to USC 2000e-2.

42 USC 2000e-2 flatly prohibits US employers from:"limit[ing], segregat[ing], or classify[ing] his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin."

Note the repeated use of the word ANY in the statute--often "overlooked" in the name of so-called "diversity." Those factors cannot be used t

When I went to college here (10 years ago), there were about 30% or less women in most CS classes. No black woman. A few black men. A few hispanic. Almost half and half Asians and Whites. When I went back to college again for graduate (about 7 years ago), there were one or two women in classes. Most of those women who were in class were Indian. I saw similar number of Asians and Whites. Still no black woman. Still one or two black men. No hispanic...

I can give those answers for the computational physics classes I've taught and the physics departments I've seen.

At my previous university, located in the Southwest in a town that is ~40% Hispanic, the physics department student body was perhaps half whites. There were no African-Americans or immigrants from Africa, and some fraction (10%?) of Hispanics*. There were quite a few East Asian immigrants, some Indian immigrants, and some Indian-Americans. There were more immigrants among graduate students than a

The Asian mix shows wonderful diversity. In fact, Asians and folks of Northern European descent get along wonderfully as witnessed by the large amount of inter marriage. About 75% of my white friends got married to Indians, Chinese, Koreans, etc. But yet no one wants to get involved with the African-Americans. The African-American neighborhoods are terribly dangerous, the kids get involved with guns & gang activity young, and they've got constant animosity with teachers and police.

BTW, just we hire someone that meets the checkbox for "diverse", they still are highly qualified. The misnomer is that hiring with diversity somehow implies a lower quality candidate. That is not true.

Of course it's true. If you had 2 equally qualified candidate and picked the one that is the race/gender of your chosing then yes,your choice of race doesn't affect the quality of the candidate (it still seems unfair to the other guy who didn't even get a coin toss).Back here in the real world though you rarely have 2 equally qualified candidate so you're passing over a more qualified candidatefor a slightly less qualified candidate. The only way you don't get a less qualified candidate is if race/gender

As a multi-ethnic interracial black Asian American gender fluid bisexual animal rights activist, in a relationship with a Somali Swede albino agendered homosexual with autism, I find it unacceptable that our particular cases are always ignored when talking about those matters.

They would probably hire them if they could solve the router problem. Most parrots I've met have a better voice than some overseas call centers I've had on the phone, but theire technical knowlege seems to be a little limited. The good news is they would work for crackers.